Ever since Elon Musk bought the company in October 2022, Twitter has been on a collision course with an iceberg.
But recent decisions — including requiring users to make an account to see tweets, limiting those who have signed up to viewing a small number of posts a day, and turning TweetDeck, a way of viewing Twitter, into a paid-for product — mean the social media platform is now a quickly sinking ship.
Plenty of small lifeboats have been let loose: Mastodon was an early haven for disaffected Twitter users, while Bluesky, an easier to use alternative, grew its userbase 20 per cent yesterday alone. But a massive, well-equipped frigate with a free bar and plenty of flotation devices is hovering on the horizon.
Threads is a new Twitter alternative from Meta, which the Facebook and Instagram-owning social media giant has teased will be released to Apple users on Thursday. Users will be able to sign up using their Instagram accounts and can post short text updates, similar to the experience you used to get on Twitter before Elon Musk degraded the app.
That Meta, owned by Mark Zuckerberg, should choose to enter the race to capitalise on Twitter’s collapse isn’t surprising. The company has tried to create homegrown alternatives for every app and service that has eclipsed it as it reaches the social media equivalent of its twilight years. Instagram Reels, launched in the summer of 2020, was its attempt to head off the rise of TikTok — and was Zuckerberg’s second shot at toppling TikTok, after a failed attempt in the late 2010s called Lasso failed to gain traction.
Similarly, Meta has been good at cannibalising the most popular features of other apps and folding them into its platforms.
It tried launching Facebook Watch, which presented Facebook users with videos in their home feed, to head off the rise of YouTube, and introduced disappearing Stories on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp after the idea of temporary content sharing proved popular on Snapchat.
Zuckerberg is a tenacious business leader who hates any upstarts upsetting his company’s dominance of social media — a dominance hard won since Facebook was first launched nearly 20 years ago. And the chance to put a spoiler out into the world that harms Musk, with whom he has recently been arguing over social media, threatening to fight in a mixed martial arts-style match, will have undoubtedly helped make his decision to release the app easier.
Whether Threads sinks or swims will depend on several factors. One is Twitter users’ appetite for creating yet another account on yet another Twitteralike (I’ve personally grown weary of restarting the work I put into building my Twitter profile first on Mastodon, then on Bluesky). Even if Zuckerberg can get people onto Threads, what the app offers will be important.
Bluesky so far has been winning among the next generation of Twitter-like apps because it most closely echoes the user experience and userbase of the original. Instagram Reels has remained a pale imitation of TikTok because it lost many of the key elements that made TikTok so popular in the first place.
History would suggest that a Meta-produced clone of an app won’t supplant the service it tries to mimic. But then again, we’ve never had such a weakened incumbent to overtake.
